It is said that aerobic exercises for reducing body fat are effective to improve lifestyle-related diseases, which have a tendency of increasing in recent years. In addition, it is considered that when sugar metabolism is enhanced by actively causing muscle contraction to improve insulin sensitivity, it contributes to improve the lifestyle-related diseases. As an exercise equipment for allowing a user to voluntarily perform an exercise, for example, a stationary cycling machines (indoor exercise bike) and a stationary running machine (treadmill) are well known. On the other hand, as another exercise equipment for allowing the user to passively perform an exercise thereby obtaining exercise effects of mainly enhancing the muscle contraction of the trunk of the body such as lumbar and back, a horse-riding exercise machine (e.g., Japanese Patent Publication [kokai] No. 11-155836) is already known.
To efficiently improve sugar metabolism by the muscle contraction, it is effective to cause the contraction of muscles having large volumes in a femoral region. However, it has been reported that diabetic patients with a high degree of obesity and elderly people are often accompanied by knee pain. Therefore, they cannot possibly perform squat exercise for effectively causing the muscle contraction at the femoral region. Even when they perform a light exercise such as walking, there is a potential for causing a clinical deterioration or an increase in knee pain. Thus, the above-described exercise equipments such as the indoor exercise bike and the treadmill are not recommended to the users with knee pain because bending and stretching exercises of knee joint are needed or a load larger than the user's own weight acts on the knee joint. On the other hand, when using the horse-riding exercise machine, the load acted on the knee joint is relatively small because the user performs an exercise in a sitting posture on a seat. However, variations in exercise effects easily occur depending on the sitting posture. In addition, since the muscle contraction is mainly caused at lumbar and back portions of the user, there is a problem that it is hard to stably obtain a desired exercise effect on the leg(s) of the user.
Thus, it is awaited to develop a new exercise equipment, which is suitable for the users having the purpose of beauty exercises or overcoming lack of exercise, and also enables the users with knee pain to safely obtain desired exercise effects.